Fighting lies with truth works better now than it used to

Dishonesty in argument is something that often dismays me about politics in our country. One of the observations I've always smugly considered to be an indication of the genuine moral superiority of left politics over right politics is the way arguments have generally been formed by the two major parties.¹ The left will make an effort to explain the actual idea they are proposing, and the right will make up outrageous lies, lies that can't possibly be true, to support their own. Ronald Reagan gained notoriety as a person who was good at this, and since then, his successors² have really developed hyperbole as a rhetorical tactic that is marvelous to behold. The beauty of the tactic of just making shit up is that if somebody comes out and says "That's not true." the burden of proof is magically on the accuser. You can say that atheists or Muslims are snatching children all over the country and turning their skin into kites every day, and it devolves to somebody else to fact-check that obvious hogwash.

Meanwhile, the liar wins the argument with their lie. In fact it's better than that, since people opposing the liar will now have to spend time straightening out the truth. The other side is continually on the defensive, playing catch-up with verifiable fact, which takes a while, to counteract the lie, which can be made up on the spot.

The bigger the lie is in the first place, the better. That way, the liar can backpedal from their original lie and say that they didn't mean that actual atheists or Muslims are actually skinning and kiting actual children on a literally daily basis, but rather that they want to, and that they will if we don't prevent it by cutting Medicare.

But I'm not troubled by this as much as I used to be. In a town hall setting, it was about winning the argument in front of the people in the room. The liar convinced a few hundred people, and the lie would persist unchallenged in a lot of those people's minds. Now, the way most people will hear about the argument is by reading an article that presents some analysis of the statements after the fact, ie, that they lied. This is great, because BS doesn't hold up to scrutiny. We have armies of people who can and do check facts on behalf of liars, just to demonstrate the liars' dishonesty in a larger public forum. This is a kind of journalism. So when Senator John Kyl says that "Well over 90% of what Planned Parenthood does" is abortion services, Journalists all over the country are completely delighted, because it's so clearly not true and they can prove it. The next day, or later that day, even, there are dozens of articles about how that's not true. And the argument percolates to the Daily Show, where John Stewart shows that it's not true, and The Onion lampoons the lie, driving home the ridiculousness of the statement. Millions of people who never would have heard John Kyl's name have now been informed that he's a liar. Now John Kyl is the guy who lied while attempting to defund Planned Parenthood.

I'm not smug about it anymore, either. Because of the likes of the Huffington Post, it's no longer true that left-of-center political advocacy doesn't plunge wantonly into the sensationalist in the interest of winning. You can't believe headlines on Huffpost, since they're intentionally misleading. Just go there any day and pick a random headline and you will have demonstrated my point. They're not even the worst perpetrators. I get a lot of emails from left organizations that are trying to drum up support for different causes. Some of them are clearly written by dishonest people who don't even go on to educate the reader, and will then advocate calling or writing a legislator. They seem to think the end justifies the means. They figure that if enough ignorant hysterical people call up their senator and demand that they vote a certain way, it'll be worth it in the end. I'm pretty sure this isn't true³, and generally when I see a pattern of this type of email, I will unsubscribe from the feed and tell them why.

Of course, their are things people can lie about, even things that are certainly false, and they'll get away with it. Clinton lied about his personal life all the time. David Wu can lie about his sexual improprieties and his knowledge of pharmaceuticals. But these lies are mainly lies about their frame of mind and their perceptions. When Clinton said he didn't inhale, he was saying "I pretended to smoke a joint to look cool," which is kind of stupid. When David Wu said that sex with the 18 year old daughter of his lifelong friend was consensual, he's admitting a lot things about himself that call his judgment into question. When he says he thought the Oxycontin⁴ his friend gave him was ibuprofen, he's saying that he can't tell whether he's on powerful opiates or not. The lies don't help his argument much, since he's basically saying "I'm not a drug-abusing rapist, I'm just retarded." He still has to resign in the end.

Bottom line: You can't get away with lying about matters of fact anymore. It hurts you more than it helps you. It's not longer possible to successfully lie about what's factually true. You can only lie about what you believe, and then the lie reflects on you. The longer it takes for Republicans to recognize that fact, the better, since it makes them look like assholes.

Notes
1. Jesus, I know the Dems aren't left at all, but they play one on TV.
2. Who engage in a kind of hollow, ritual-worship of the man without really knowing anything about him. Sound like anything else to you?
3. Probably because I have enough contact with my legislators to know that they do not base their decisions on public opinion, but rather on private, corporate opinion.
4. Oxycontin is twice as powerful of an opioid as morphine. If you take it, you will become a 50's jazz musician. There is no way to fail to notice that you have taken Oxycontin, unless you take so much of it that you go on the nod.

That old trick again

I sometimes think about the development of the "social movements" that seem so cohesive today: anti-abortion activism, anti-gay activism, anti-science activism and I try to imagine a few decades ago, when these discussion topics were being dreamed up. I am inclined to imagine a conspiracy theory when I see this development of groups who expend so much energy for things which cannot adversely affect them. Surely many feel odd about homosexuality, but is it really necessary to castigate the gay? Surely abortion is distasteful, but why do so many people care that a few thousand people get abortions? (They just would have raised atheist children anyway.) Sure, it's confusing stuff, but how can so many people disavow the entire discipline of biology, and also be on blood pressure medication simultaneously? It must take a lot of effort to maintain such strong beliefs.

Much more satisfying to me is to imagine that these movements are the result of organized efforts to rouse people who would not otherwise care particularly. In fact, it occurs to me that an it might be advantageous to specifically seek out people who wouldn't care, and to encourage them to care.

I think an argument can be made that a political group which had an agenda which would not be in accordance with common values would do well to seek out and court constituents with unexamined prejudices. I should say unexamined prejudices which are of no consequence to that groups main goals. The beauty of unexamined prejudices is that they work on people without the people knowing why.

If you were in a group that wanted to, for instance, reduce taxes for themselves at the expense of social programs you didn't use, since you are rich, but at the same time wanted to maintain high government spending on, say, military weapons manufacture, oil development or cattle ranching, because you are invested in those businesses, you might have trouble getting poor people to support your cause. You're basically fucking them over, after all, and they're bound to notice that at some point. So you need to develop some outer hull of political philosophy, if you will, a streamlined set of ideas that will strike at the heart of normal people. And that's where it would be handy to recognize the unexamined prejudices of your target group.

Religion is the major unexamined prejudice which people typically harbor. To the degree that it is possible to do so, it is always a good idea to attempt to equate the work of your group with the dominant religion. If there isn't a dominant religion, per se, then seek to be as vague as possible about the actual details of the religion, except where it aligns with other unexamined prejudices.

killing babies is something that you will be likely to get people to disagree with. In fact, infanticide is so universally despised that almost no one ever does it, which if you've ever spent much time around little kids will probably strike you as unlikely. Killing babies is universally frowned upon, so no one does it, so the next-best thing is to equate abortion with baby killing. Abortion doesn't kill babies. Here's how I know. Babies have birth certificates. It's how you prove they were born. Fetuses don't have them, so they can't be killed. But, fetuses turn in to babies when they're born, so they're pretty similar. That's good news, because according to wikipedia, 50 million abortions have been performed in the US since 1973. This is an enormous number! in that same stretch of time, about 130 million people have been born in the US, so, like a quarter of all pregnancies end in abortion. If those fetuses are the same thing as babies, then that's baby killing on a scale that would make King Herod envious. Get a few religious leaders to do some pulpit work, and you'll have a nice big group of people who will let you do whatever you want, so long as you also try to stop the baby-killing.

Suppose you were from another planet, a non-human, but intelligent and rational. Imagine you came to the American civic debate without any context, and somebody appointed themselves as your Virgil and was giving you a little primer by walking you through the circles of US politics so you can go back to your planet and write an epic poem about Your visit. Imagine they were trying to explain the way things are, and you, completely ignorant of the ways of Americans, but with some basic familiarity with animals, are trying to connect the dots.

Spose that your Virgil gets to the part where they describe that there are two groups of people who experience a fair amount of enmity. One of the groups has major problems with the mere existence of the other, and the other group mainly objects to the efforts of the first group to oppress and marginalize them. Your Virgil mentions their names to you, but honestly you think most human names sound almost exactly the same, and you're always losing track of which group is which. So you get this jumbled collection of facts about the two groups, and you try to apply a little logic to the situation to parse the pile of attributes to give two coherent groups with these facts nicely divided among the two.

Here are the facts, which for your benefit I will construct as a series of "us" and "them" statements which one group might make
1. We hate them because we feel that their existence threatens our existence.
2. We believe that they choose to be the way that they are.
3. We believe that they are wrong to choose to be the way they are.
4. We dislike that they choose to openly express something which is private and which they could conceal if they chose.
5. Many of them are secretly us.
6. They are misled, while we possess the truth.
7. they use lies and prejudices to malign us publicly.
8. We have a history of being oppressed.
9. We are just trying to live our lives, but they won't let us.
10. They recruit children to live their lifestyle.
11. They have an organized agenda.
12. They are aberrant and unnatural.
13. We must eradicate them to preserve our lives.
14. They actively seek positions in government to further their aims.
15. We are normal, they are not.
16. We are a group because of our common beliefs, while they are a group because they are collectively deceived.
17. We are a group because of our common nature, while they are a group because they are collectively misled.
18. We are Christians, they are Satanists.
19. We are gay, they are bigots.

I think you would find this to be an inconvenient set of facts to separate. I think you would be liable to make errors when you went to write your poem, because it wouldn't occur to you to think that a group which identifies itself by a religious philosophy, which must be acquired from other people, are the people accusing the group who is identified by a sexual orientation, which is largely determined by an individual's biology, recruits children. Surely, you might think, a group that must necessarily recruit to spread, a group which organizes countless Summer camps, Sunday Schools, etc. wouldn't accuse a group that occurs naturally throughout the animal kingdom of recruiting children. That would be simply too rich. No one would attribute them with any credibility at all, if they went around saying that.

Surely humans cannot have such poorly formed thinking organs that they would imagine that another group would voluntarily take on the personal attributes which other people would lynch them for displaying. You obviously hide those traits that are similar to those you have witnessed be persecuted. That's as natural to a social animal as being polite to those who are bigger and stronger than you.

This is why I say we are doomed. It is easy to prey on the stupidity of people, but it is very difficult make people less stupid. To some degree it is impossible. So the bad folks will be able to control the agenda forever, and there's not a lot to be done about it.